The Jailhouse Lawyer Derrick Hamilton’s Role in the Reversal of a Murder Conviction

Derrick Hamilton leaves a Brooklyn courthouse in January, 2015, after his 1991 murder conviction was vacated.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ANTHONY LANZILOTE / THE NEW YORK TIMES / REDUX

Derrick Hamilton never went to law school, but prisoners across New York State have heard about his formidable legal skills, which he acquired while he was wrongly imprisoned for murder for more than two decades, reading law books and fighting to get himself and other inmates set free. I recently wrote about Hamilton, who was released in 2011, for the magazine; he works as a paralegal in New York City and continues to help prisoners he believes to be innocent. Last year, I travelled with him to Green Haven prison, in Dutchess County, to visit a client serving twenty-five to life. This prisoner, who had once been confined on the same cellblock as Hamilton, told me about the excitement that would spread among inmates when they found out that Hamilton had been transferred to their prison. “Everybody knows him,” the inmate said. “First thing that crosses everybody’s mind is ‘Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!’ ”

That day, in Green Haven’s visiting room, when Hamilton walked over to the vending machines to buy snacks, an inmate flagged him down and begged him for help with his case. The same thing happened last year when Hamilton went to visit a client at Shawangunk prison, in upstate New York. In the visiting room, a man Hamilton had never met before—Wayne Martin, then in his fifth year of a life sentence for a double homicide—approached him and said, “Derrick, listen, I’ve got a good case.”

At the time, Hamilton was mentoring a young lawyer named Justin Bonus, who had graduated from the Roger Williams University School of Law, in 2011. Bonus had heard about Hamilton’s reputation as a jailhouse lawyer and tracked down Hamilton after his release from prison. “I’m almost in law school again—that’s how I feel,” Bonus, who is thirty-six, told me. “He’s as good as a professor. Better, probably, because he’s more practical.” Hamilton directed Bonus to take a close look at Martin’s case.

Martin had been found guilty of shooting three people—Gary Turner, his son Donald, and Ricardo Davids—during an attempted robbery of Gary’s Tire Emporium, in Brooklyn, in 2005. The elder Turner and Davids were killed. The shooter escaped, but the police found inside the store a ski mask that a witness said the shooter had worn; later, a detective said he found a black knit hat outside on the sidewalk. The police entered the DNA on them into a database, and seven months later there was a match: the hat appeared to have Martin’s DNA on it. (Martin’s DNA was in the database; he had an earlier robbery conviction.)

At Martin’s trial, in 2010, two people testified that they had seen him commit the crime: Turner’s son Donald, who was seriously injured in the shooting and later suffered a stroke and amnesia, and a man named Michael Walker, a friend of Turner’s, who had been at the scene. After the trial, Martin appealed his conviction, and was turned down. By the time Martin had spied Hamilton in his prison’s visiting room, he was no longer eligible for a free attorney; he was attempting to fight his conviction in federal court on his own.

With Hamilton advising him, Bonus scrutinized Martin’s case file and visited him at Shawangunk, and he discovered a number of details that he thought raised serious doubts about Martin’s conviction. With guidance from Hamilton and Hamilton’s boss, a criminal-defense attorney named Scott Brettschneider, Bonus began working on a post-conviction motion that he planned to file on Martin’s behalf in state court. Hamilton advised Bonus to file a notice in federal court, too, stating that he was representing Martin; Bonus did this on June 4th, and also sent a letter to the District Attorney’s office asking for more time to prepare his motion. What happened next surprised Bonus, Hamilton, and Brettschneider. Bonus got a message from Mark Hale, the head of the D.A.’s Conviction Review Unit, asking him to come into the office—and to bring Martin’s case file, which Bonus had obtained from Martin’s former attorney.

Before a trial begins, prosecutors are required to hand over documents about their case—known as “discovery”—to defense attorneys, including any evidence that might help defendants prove their innocence. As it happened, in January, while preparing a response to Martin’s petition in federal court, a prosecutor in the D.A.’s office had gone through the office’s files on the case and discovered something very strange. Inside a file labelled “Discovery” were two versions of a document known as the “homicide investigative report.” Only one of the versions contained two crucial sentences, revealing that, forty minutes after the murder, Michael Walker had identified somebody else as the possible killer. (That man, Jeffrey Joseph, had been shot about eleven minutes later, a block and a half away; he is now serving time on an unrelated manslaughter case.)

After combing through the files of Martin’s trial attorney, prosecutors did not find either version of the report. They also concluded that Martin’s trial lawyer had never received another piece of exculpatory evidence: a police memo recounting that, eleven days after the crime, a man named Michael Belgrove had told the police that he’d been outside the tire shop and had seen the shooter—and that he’d seen this same man afterward on the local news, accused of fatally shooting an N.Y.P.D. officer. (That murder took place ten hours after the shooting at the tire shop, less than three miles away. A man named Allan Cameron was convicted of killing the officer and is now in prison.)

On June 17th, Hale sent a letter to the Brooklyn State Supreme Court’s administrative judge revealing his office’s findings. The Times reported on the re-opening of the Martin case, and the D.A.’s office launched an ethics investigation into whether anyone in the office had committed prosecutorial misconduct. Marc J. Fliedner, the prosecutor who had handled the Martin case, denied any wrongdoing; in a written statement, he pointed out that he did not start working on the case until 2008 and insisted that that he had “provided all exculpatory materials known to me.” (Fliedner, who recently left the D.A.’s office, has also suggested that the timing of Hale’s letter was not a coincidence; two days earlier, he had publicly attacked his former boss, the Brooklyn District Attorney, Kenneth P. Thompson, telling the _Daily New_s that Thompson is “abusive” and “misuses his staff.”) Meanwhile, Hamilton, Brettschneider, and Bonus kept digging into Martin’s case, trying to identify the real shooter. Hamilton and Bonus went to Five Points prison to interview Joseph, and Hamilton tracked down Belgrove.

It can take many, many years for a lawyer to get a wrongly convicted man set free—if it happens at all—but the case against Martin fell apart fast. On Thursday morning, an officer whisked him into a courtroom at Brooklyn State Supreme Court. Martin stood before the judge in a white dress shirt and khaki pants, his hands cuffed behind his back, three television cameras pointed at him from the jury box.

Hale asked the judge to vacate Martin’s conviction, explaining that there had been an “obvious constitutional violation” and that his trial had been “grossly unfair.” Brettschneider pointed out additional flaws in Martin’s prosecution and suggested that the true culprit was Allan Cameron; he held up pictures of the two men to show their resemblance to each other. (Cameron shot and killed a police officer later that night, following a car chase; Brettschneider theorized that Cameron had been trying to flee the police because he had committed the shootings at the tire store.)

Hamilton watched from the third row as Brettschneider asked the judge to release Martin; Hale asked the judge to keep Martin in jail, saying that his office needed thirty days to investigate the case and decide whether to put Martin on trial again. The judge threw out Martin’s murder conviction and life sentence—but he didn’t set Martin free, at least not yet. Instead, he told everyone to come back in two weeks. In the hallway afterward, Hamilton appeared jubilant. He told me that, at the next court date, "I think the judge is going to let him out.”